"Among Wall Street’s financial elite, SBF’s Bitcoin arb is mentioned in the same hushed tones as Paul Tudor Jones’s 1987 shorting of the entire American economy, or George Soros’s 1992 raid on the Bank of England, or John Paulson’s 2008 bet against subprime mortgages. Alameda’s capture of the kimchi premium (and other trades like it) gave SBF the grubstake he needed for his next move: founding the crypto exchange FTX—a company that may very well end up creating the dominant all-in-one financial super-app of the future."
That is what aggravates me the most: that there is so much money sloshing around out there, desperate to be spent, and it goes to obvious bullshit instead of building bio-sand water filters for every off-grid community in the world, or ensuring everyone in the world gets a sandwich at least once a day, or basically ANYTHING that would make the world a better place for everyone. Instead, over-privileged, over-wealthy, over-gullible people are wasting the economy on digital artifacts. What a senseless waste.
If it's any consolation I expect that a significant portion of the "billions" they're talking about simply never existed.
E.g. I print a trillion tokens, keep most in my pocket but give out some chunks to friends and put a few percent on the open market. They trade on the open market for $1 and tada I'm a trillionaire. The token price crashes and now my friends have lost billions.
But it was all just a mirage.
There are real losses in that example-- the suckers that bought the tokens for $1 on the market-- but they may be tiny compared to the numbers being discussed.
